As the creation of a blog requires the hosting service, many newbie bloggers are confused about the selection of blog web hosting.

In this post, I would like to come out with the top tips that you need to take into account when choosing a web host for your site. Generally, these aspects include price, ease of use, features, hosting performance and technical support.

Age of the hosting company

Never choose a hosting company to host your blog that's brand new.

Most of the hosting companies, close after a short time of its inception.
For most of the hosting companies, you pay for one year hosting up front. Right?

What if, those companies shut themselves up after a month or a two?

So, remember to choose always the best-hosting company that has been there on the web for a long time.

Affordable But Not Cheap Hosting Charges

As researched, 65% of blogs worldwide are small ones used for personal purposes. For these sites, there is no need to spend too much on the hosting charges. On average, the monthly price of blog web hosting is around $7. Therefore, if your selected web host sets the price higher than $10/mo, then simply give it up.

Here, you need to note that what I recommend is the affordable and budget-friendly hosting service, but not some extremely cheap or even free hosting packages. This is due to the following three reasons.

Web hosts need to generate profit. Thus, if they charge you little or even nothing, they may recoup their losses by charging you some hidden fees. Or, they may only offer a few useless features. When you need some really useful ones, you have to pay a lot.

Free or cheap web hosts can only give you a very limited amount of server resources.

You cannot expect a high performance and secure hosting environment by only spending such a low price every month.

Ease of Use

At present, there are many scripts that can be used as the blog builder, including WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal. As the installation of these scripts manually is not an easy thing for common bloggers, many quality web hosts have included the one-click scripts installer into the hosting packages.

With these tools, you can start blogging simply by a few clicks of buttons, without the need to unzip files, create databases, make configurations.

The control panel is also important because it directly influences the ease and effectiveness of the management of hosting account and blog site. Personally, cPanel is the most widely-used control panel. Its intuitive and a graphic-based interface that leaves little learning curve even for a 5-grade student.

In this case, if your selected web host offers the cPanel control panel and the auto-installer like SimpleScripts, Softaculous, Fantastico, and QuickInstall. These are worth trying.

Features

For blog building, you do not need too many advanced features like Perl, Python, and Ruby on Rails. Instead, you only need to pay attention to some basic ones like the amount of disk space and monthly data transfer, the period of money back guarantee, the frequency of website data backup, security services like SSL and SSH, the number of domains allowed on one account and the availability of free features including the free domain name (for 1 year or for the lifetime) and advertising credits.

You have to ask your web host about the version of PHP, MySQL and the mod­_rewrite Apache module. These aspects directly affect the compatibility of your blogging builder. So you have to make sure that they are all offered with the latest advanced versions.

Hosting Performance

You have to note that people hate to visit some websites that are always inaccessible online. Also, search engines are less likely to browse the sites coming with the frequent downtime. In this case, you have to make sure that the web hosting service you get guarantees a good uptime track record, 99.9% at least.

After all, we are living in a world where the speed and effectiveness are the keys. Generally, people will leave a webpage that requires more than 8 seconds to open and load.

To check whether your select web hosting can promise you a good uptime and fast hosting speed, you can do the following 3 things.

Search the information to figure out whether it uses the robust and high-specification web servers, as well as locating these web servers at the world-class data centers.

Find the customer feedbacks to check the customer satisfaction rate of the offered hosting performance.

Check the real statistics from some reliable hosting review sites like LinkedHosts.

Is it optimized for say WordPress

WordPress is the most popular blogging CMS around.

So I take WordPress as an example.

I'm sure that many of the hosting providers offer a quick install feature to install WordPress with a single click.

If you are too paranoid about the performance of your site, you can look into some of the managed WordPress hosting solutions like ResellerClub and WPEngine.

They will make sure that your site is up all the time. They offer features like timely updates and security fixes.

They offer you 24/7 premium support by WordPress experts.

But the cost is a bit high.

Technical Support

Now, let's move to the last aspect – technical support. In general, a majority of the bloggers are newbies in the web hosting industry, and no one can guarantee that they will never meet technical problems. In this case, the responsive technical support is really critical.

Here, you need to make sure that the blog hosting you choose offers 24/7 support service; thus you can ask for help at any time you need, especially when your site is down.

Besides, the hosting channel should at least include the phone calling, email sending and live chat. For example, I'm hosting my site on HostGator.com in India. I don't have any contact number to contact them. But I can contact them with the help of Skype or Google Hangouts, entering their U.S toll-free number.

To be honest, support is the core of the hosting service, which requires you to pay much attention.

I hope the above tips helped you a lot to choose best hosting providers.

DISCLOSURE

This post may contain affiliate links, meaning that if you click on one of the links and purchase an item, we may receive a commission (at no additional cost to you). All opinions are our own and we do not accept payments for positive reviews.

About Akshay Hallur

Hi, I’m Akshay Hallur. The founder of this blog GoBloggingTips. I’m a professional full-time blogger, an internet marketer, and a trainer. I’m here to help bloggers like YOU to create an outstanding blog and earn money from it.